Volunteering for Kerry in Columbus OH, Part 3

Third in a series about my experience of going to Columbus OH from my home in Boston MA to volunteer full time for the Kerry Campaign, August 19-29.

Part 2 highlighted ways in which intelligent volunteers could get the OH Kerry campaign on the right track.
Part 1 was focused on the critical undersupplying of basic material at the Kerry campaign.  It looks like the lion's share of our money has been used to buy air time.  The local offices need us to make up the slack, buying them office supplies, stamps, and sometimes even bumper stickers!

This diary is more positive than the others, and is focused on our struggle to keep Nader from wrongly getting onto the OH ballot.

In spite of the problems mentioned previously, the office was well organized. They delegated authority well; I witnessed one full-time volunteer get promoted to "data entry czar" = in charge of recruiting and training other volunteers to stay on top of the data entry.  Great guy, currently unemployed, but this should be great experience!

By coincidence, the day I arrived was the day that the signatures submitted to get Nader on the Ohio ballot became public record.  At first glance, it was looking like he'd make it, as they handed in over 14,000 signatures, and only 5,000 are required to make the ballot.  Normally around 30% of signatures get knocked out, but Nader's signatures have been up to 75% invalid, so the OH Dem. Party decided to give it a shot.  The high cheating rate is of course a function of the fact that most of the Nader signature gatherers are paid $2 per signature for a wildly unpopular cause, so they have every incentive in the world to lie and cheat.

 A lot of us spent the first weekend typing in every name/address of every petition.  Then people went through the petitions for every single mistake.  Particularly sweet is that in some cases the collector was not registered to vote, which by OH law invalidates every signature collected.  During the week we were calling a scattering of people to confirm that they'd signed.  We didn't find much evidence of outright fraud (= people's signature being plain made up), but in my experience at least a third of the signers thought that they were signing for something other than Nader, for example, to get independent county-level candidates on the ballot.

I take particular pride in discovering an error 7 days into the process which nobody had caught before:  in OH, the nominating papers have all relevant information on what you're signing for on one side of the paper, and signature lines on the other side.  While checkign for possible forged addresses, I noticed that some of these petitions handed in by the Nader campaign to get him on the ballot were not for Nader!  We did a full comb though, and found that over 400 "Nader" signatures were on petitions to get Michael Badnarik, the Libertarian candidate, on the ballot.  Nearly 300 of these were collected by one guy, who is no doubt quite proud of himself for hustling the Nader campaign out of nearly 600 bucks.

I heard a rumor that if all of our objections to various signatures were upheld, they'd be down to 4300 Nader signature.  This was before my discovery of the petitions for the wrong person.  So there's a decent chance that there won't be a spoiler in OH.  Anyway, if Nader end up not on the ballot in OH, you can thank the party members and volunteers who worked their tails off for a week making sure that he didn't slither onto the ballot without 5000 valid signatures.

Oh, one last point, which I repeat every diary:  due to really stupid campaign laws, if you sign up to volunteer on JohnKerry.com as a volunteer, they are not able to pass your name along to the local campaign office, which is probably run by the Democratic Party.  So as I type there are thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of volunteers who are scratching their heads wondering why the campaign doesn't seem to need their assistance, while at the same time the campaigns are desperate for more volunteers.  So please, if you've done this, please find the phone number of your local campaign HQ or Dem. Party, pick up the phone, and call.